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Attempt to Break New Irish Blasphemy Law

By Robert Mackey January 4, 2010 7:59 pmJanuary 4, 2010 7:59 pm

Is it now illegal to repeat one of the lines from this film in Ireland?

Last Friday morning in Ireland, about 30 minutes after a new law took effect with the new year that makes blasphemy a crime punishable by a fine of up to $35,000, a group of Irish atheists invited the government to prosecute them by publishing 25 blasphemous statements on an Irish Web site.

As The Lede explained last July — when the bill was signed by Ireland’s president, Mary McAleese — even though Ireland’s Constitution calls blasphemy a criminal act, the police force had no legal means to prosecute blasphemers.

According to the updated Irish Statute Book, the criminal blasphemer is defined as someone who “publishes or utters matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion, and … intends, by the publication or utterance of the matter concerned, to cause such outrage.”

On the Web site Blasphemy.ie, Michael Nugent, a writer and co-founder of Atheist Ireland, wrote that his group was trying hard to break the new law because it is “both silly and dangerous.” Mr. Nugent explained:

It is silly because medieval religious laws have no place in a modern secular republic, where the criminal law should protect people and not ideas. And it is dangerous because it incentives religious outrage, and because Islamic states led by Pakistan are already using the wording of this Irish law to promote new blasphemy laws at U.N. level.

Given that the law explicitly states that the intention of the blasphemer has to be to cause outrage, it is not clear if the Irish atheists have really succeeded in breaking it. The 25 statements published on Blasphemy.ie are largely inoffensive quotes from people like Jesus, Mark Twain and a fictional character in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” that are unlikely to ever fill the streets of Dublin with enraged protesters.

What makes the Irish group’s attempt to break the law seem particularly tame is that it came on the same day last week that an axe-wielding man in Denmark tried to attack a cartoonist who offended millions of Muslims by publishing a drawing thought to show the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. Say what you will about the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which intentionally published 12 cartoons mocking Islam in 2005, but that publication certainly showed how to cause the kind of outrage described in Ireland’s new law.

If the Irish atheists had wanted to make sure that they were breaking Ireland’s new law, they could simply have republished those cartoons, as the blogger Andrew Sullivan did last week in response to the attack on the cartoonist.

Indeed, some observers in Ireland, noting that the country’s Christian leaders made no public request for the legal prohibition on blasphemy to be made enforceable, have guessed that the government may have been acting mainly to restrain any Irish publisher from following the lead of the conservative Danish paper in offending Muslim sensibilities. David Quinn, a former editor of a Catholic newspaper in Ireland, told NPR that the new Irish law may have been introduced not to placate Ireland’s Christian majority, but because “there was a fear that we might get a Danish cartoon-style controversy in Ireland — that some newspaper might publish something that Muslims found highly offensive — and it might have repercussions for Irish trade in the Muslim world.”

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